Set at Edward R. Murrow High School, a Brooklyn public school consistently ranked as one of the country's best, The Kings of New York (renamed Game of Kings for paperback) follows the school's venerable chess teamconsistently ranked the bestas it tries for yet another championship. While the story is about the oddballs and geniuses, their success is inevitably a function of their coach, a 50-something math teacher at Murrow named Eliot Weiss. Weiss's program began humbly some 30 years ago as a chess club. As of current writing, his juggernaut of a chess team has won 10 straight New York State chess championships and seven national championships, four of them consecutive.